By Kristina Peterson, Rebecca Ballhaus and Laura Meckler 

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump on Friday signed a sweeping $1.3 trillion bill detailing U.S. spending levels until October, dropping a threat to veto the bill just hours before the government's funding was due to expire.

Mr. Trump's televised announcement that he had signed the spending bill capped a tumultuous week of negotiations over the legislation, which was unveiled Wednesday night. The bill passed the House on Thursday and the Senate early Friday. Most lawmakers then left Washington for a two-week recess, assuming the president would sign the bill before the government's funding expired at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, as his top aides said that he would.

But Mr. Trump upended the process, writing in a tweet Friday morning he might veto the bill because he didn't like its immigration provisions. By early Friday afternoon, the president said he had decided the bill's boost for military spending had persuaded him to sign it after all. The bill lifts military spending by $80 billion and domestic spending by $63 billion above limits set in 2011.

"As a matter of national security, I've signed this omnibus budget bill, " Mr. Trump said, before quickly adding that there were "a lot of things I'm unhappy about in this bill."

Mr. Trump said the package lifted federal spending too much, and he chastised congressional leaders for releasing the 2,232-page bill without giving lawmakers and the White House enough time to read it.

"I say to Congress -- I will never sign another bill like this again," Mr. Trump said.

The spending bill funds the government until Oct. 1. Mr. Trump's warning suggests Congress could end up in a fiscal standoff with him barely a month before the midterm elections, although lawmakers might opt to pass a short-term extension.

The bill does nothing to help young undocumented immigrants who had been protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Mr. Trump ended that program in September but gave Congress until this month to legislate a replacement. Meanwhile, a federal court has ordered that the administration continue the program for now, easing some of the urgency for lawmakers to agree to a fix.

On Friday, Mr. Trump repeatedly blamed Democrats for the bill's lack of a DACA measure, even though Democrats strongly support such protections and had offered to include protections for the DACA population along with $25 billion for a border wall, a proposal Mr. Trump rejected.

"We wanted to include DACA in this bill," Mr. Trump told reporters. "The Democrats would not do it."

As recently as Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump's senior aides said he would sign the bill. But in a tweet early Friday, Mr. Trump warned he might veto it and complained that DACA recipients had been "totally abandoned by the Democrats" and that "the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded."

The veto threat prompted lawmakers from both parties to urge him to sign the bill, the product of weeks of intense bipartisan negotiations. A veto would have likely led to a government shutdown, given that most members of Congress had already left Washington.

But some conservatives cheered Mr. Trump on, encouraging him to abandon the measure because they said it provided too little funding for the border wall and too much funding for the rest of the government.

Some Democrats, meanwhile, had also opposed the spending bill because it didn't include an extension of the DACA program.

"I could not support the government funding bill because it fails to address the uncertainty and fear Dreamers live with every day," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said in a statement Friday morning. "President Trump unilaterally rescinded DACA and has since rejected every single bipartisan proposal that would solve the problem he created."

The spending bill includes $1.57 billion for construction of physical barriers on the border with Mexico and other security measures. Mr. Trump won funding for 33 miles of new fencing on the Texas border -- about half of what he requested. He also got funding for 60 miles of replacement or secondary fencing. That was more than Mr. Trump asked for but is also far less controversial.

"It does a lot of what we wanted," White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said Thursday.

Democrats won a number of concessions in the spending bill, particularly regarding immigration enforcement inside the U.S. The bill also specified that the new border construction must use designs now in use, which rules out a solid concrete wall.

In January, Democrats tried to use their leverage on spending bills to force negotiations over a permanent resolution to the DACA issue. But the ensuing three-day government shutdown produced only a series of votes in the Senate on a handful of immigration measures, none of which got the 60 votes needed to advance.

Mr. Trump opposed a bipartisan Senate immigration proposal that administration officials said didn't meet all of his requirements, and turned down the deal that would have paired $25 billion in border-wall spending with a path to citizenship for people eligible for DACA. The president has said legal protections for the Dreamers must be paired with tighter border security, including funding for a wall, as well as curbs to the family-based migration system and an end to the diversity visa lottery, which makes eligible for entry 50,000 people from countries that are underrepresented.

The spending measure includes more money for the National Institutes of Health, Head Start and child-care programs, opioid research and treatment, veterans' health care and infrastructure.

At the White House on Friday, Mr. Trump said he was "disappointed" the bill funded items he considered a waste of money, without specifying which ones.

Mr. Trump also reiterated his call to lower the voting threshold in the Senate, where most bills need 60 votes to clear procedural hurdles. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose Republicans control 51 of the 100 seats, has said there is no appetite for changing that threshold.

Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com, Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com and Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 23, 2018 16:32 ET (20:32 GMT)